THE KILL CHAIN by Christian Brose

• it is impossible to solve a problem that no one knows exists.
• Over the past decade, in US war games against China, the United States has a nearly perfect record: we have lost almost every single time.
• The goal is to buy deterrence, the prevention of war. And the only way to deter wars is to be so clearly capable of winning them that no rival power ever seeks to get its way through violence.
• Rather, the ability to prevail in war, and thereby prevent it, comes down to one thing: the kill chain.
• The kill chain is a process that occurs on the battlefield or wherever militaries compete. It involves three steps: The first is gaining understanding about what is happening. The second is making a decision about what to do. And the third is taking action that creates an effect to achieve an objective.
• We remained focused on building and buying platforms rather than kill chains.
• From 1990 to 2017, the Chinese military budget increased by 900 percent.
• The Chinese Communist Party aims to become the dominant power in Asia and in the world, and it believes that for China to win, America must lose.
• A core pillar of the Chinese Communist Party’s plan is harnessing emerging technologies to “leapfrog” the United States and become the world’s preeminent power.
• New technologies are important, but not as important as new thinking.
• the real problem is a lack of imagination.
• The result is that we have run our military into the ground through repeated deployments of limited strategic value, and US adversaries have factored this into their plans to counter us.
• The bigger issue is that most of these allegedly information age military systems struggle to share information and communicate directly with one another to a degree that would shock most Americans.
• Such information-sharing problems are more the rule than the exception, not just with Air Force programs but also in the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps, and certainly between them.
• The Pentagon kept planning to fight in the same ways: technologically inferior enemies, uncontested battlefields, iron mountains, slow kill chains, and little attrition in combat.
• The connections between our military systems tend to be highly rigid, excessively manual, rather brittle, and thus slow.
• The reason that Washington got Russia so wrong for so long can be traced back to high hopes—perhaps even wishful thinking—after the Cold War.
• What each president was slow to learn was that Russia was more interested in restoring the great-power status it lost in 1991 than in becoming the partner the United States hoped it would be.
• Under what it called its 995 Plan (named for the Belgrade embassy attack in May 1999), China accelerated work to build a different kind of military. It continued to spend money on traditional military systems, such as ships and tanks, but its priority was to develop what it called “Assassin’s Mace” weapons. The name refers to special weapons that were used in Chinese history to defeat more powerful adversaries.
• The simple idea was that the US giant could not move or fight if it were deaf, dumb, and blind.
• US companies that entered joint ventures in China did so knowing that they were essentially putting their intellectual property in the hands of the Chinese state, which would use it to develop its domestic industries and its military.
• Americans are inclined to scoff at China’s centralized and authoritarian approach to technological innovation. However, it must be acknowledged that China has consistently beaten US projections of both the quality and the quantity of advanced military technology that it could develop and how quickly it could do so.
• Ultimately, the strategic challenge that China poses dwarfs that of Russia. Despite all of its hostile rhetoric and saber rattling, Russia possesses orders of magnitude less conventional economic and military power than China, and that disparity grows wider every day.
• In reality, however, China has been systematically transforming its military since 1993.
• As early as 1993, China declared that its military’s goal would be “fighting local wars under high technology conditions.”
• Although some traditional defense companies were developing some of these technologies, such as advanced missiles and directed energy weapons, many of the most consequential technologies were being developed by commercial enterprises that were not interested in providing them to the US military.
• It is difficult to overstate the all-encompassing sense of urgency that Washington felt in the early years of the Cold War.
• The paramount concern was picking winners: the priorities that were more important than anything else, the people who could succeed where others could not, and the industrialists who could quickly build amazing technology that worked. Other concerns, such as fairness and efficiency, were of secondary importance.
• Everyone knew what the priorities were. Everyone knew that a ton of money was being spent on them.
• This is how Silicon Valley originated: as a start-up incubated by the Department of Defense.
• A sprawling bureaucracy materialized in the 1960s to administer and discipline the military-industrial complex.
• Under his tenure, in the spirit of improving efficiency, new layers of oversight, analysis, and management were added, and these grew and began choking off the ability to develop breakthrough technologies quickly.
• For its part, Congress tied the military’s hands through the budget process, making it harder to spend money in new ways or on new ideas that were not exactly what the Pentagon had “programmed” and Congress had decreed.
• The result was that the process of developing military technology became harder, slower, and less creative.
• Military procurement had become “politicized by a blizzard of legislation” and stifled by a “maze of top-down micro-management.”
• When the Soviet threat disappeared, any sense of urgency in military acquisition went with it.
• A large and sustained reduction in federal funding for defense research and development began in the 1990s.
• Members of Congress earmarked much of what money remained for research activities in their states and districts, and these often had more political than military value.
• An arguably bigger problem was that the United States radically slowed its iterative development of new military systems.
• More and more of America’s defense spending shifted from developing new things to operating and maintaining old things.
• The slowing of innovation increased the temptation in government and industry to begin programs that depended on future technological miracles.
• Defense companies spent less money on research and development and more on armies of lawyers, lobbyists, accountants, and consultants to help them comply with the Pentagon’s growing acquisition bureaucracy and win more of the shrinking number of large contracts.
• Put simply, the US government created incentives for defense companies to do the wrong things, and that is often what happened.
• It is estimated that seventeen thousand companies dropped out of the defense business between 2011 and 2015.
• As defense companies grew larger, their creative engineers and technologists struggled to move fast and solve problems in the face of ever-expanding corporate bureaucracies.
• The defense establishment primarily thought (and still thinks) in terms of
• The Pentagon and Congress did not know how to buy synergy between platforms, and building connectivity is not the expertise of traditional defense companies.
• Nvidia’s core technology is called a graphics processing unit, which its founders created not with militaries in mind but video games.
• most US military systems are many years behind the state-of-the-art technology that commercial companies such as Nvidia are developing.
• The information that most US military machines collect is not actually processed onboard the machine itself. It is either stored on the system and then processed hours or even days later when the machine returns from its mission. Or it is streamed back to an operations center in real time, terabyte by terabyte, which places a huge burden on military communications networks.
• Either way, it is the job of humans, not machines, to comb through most of that data and find the relevant bits of information.
• At its core, the information revolution still comprises the same basic building blocks as when that term became a buzzword in the 1990s. It is the mutually reinforcing development of sensors (which collect information), computers (which process and store information), and networks (which move information). Because improvements in one of these technologies enable, and indeed require, progress in the other two, the resulting pace of change has been exponential.
• military networks are like a medieval world of unpaved roads, handmade bridges, and checkpoints that inhibit more than facilitate the flow of information. The result is that most platforms and systems in the Department of Defense do not—indeed, cannot—connect to other platforms and systems, and certainly not easily, quickly, or reliably.
• The world is now awash in low-cost, high-quality, and increasingly miniaturized sensors—electro-optical, infrared, radar, lidar, and radio-frequency sensors that enable machines to see, as well as acoustic sensors that enable machines like Alexa or Siri to hear everything.
• As sensors are proliferating on Earth, they are also blanketing it in outer space.
• Computer processing has been decentralized and pushed out to the edge of the network, creating an ever-expanding network of smart systems such as vehicles, appliances, and even entire homes that collect, process, and communicate information by virtue of being connected to everything else—the so-called Internet of Things.
• For most military systems, the schedule for hardware updates determines the schedule for software updates. After all, most of the companies building these systems are hardware companies, not software companies.
• This has created multiyear software development cycles that are doomed to failure.
• Most of the Department of Defense is ill equipped to take advantage of machine learning in part because of how it deals with its own data.
• Low-cost space launch has spawned a whole new industry in microsatellites.
• In short, in just one decade commercial technology companies in California and elsewhere overturned many core assumptions about access to space, and they are now expanding the frontiers of the information revolution beyond Earth’s atmosphere.
• A development with extraordinary military significance is additive manufacturing, which enables complex parts and even finished products to be printed in three dimensions using different kinds of materials, from low-cost plastics to carbon fiber to molten metals.
• Quantum science runs contrary to the basic laws of physics, which is why Albert Einstein once called it “spooky.” But it has been demonstrably proven, and there is now a big commercial push to build new kinds of quantum-based information technologies.
• When people in Washington and elsewhere wonder why more engineering talent and private capital are not flowing into defense technology, the reason is not more complicated than this: three decades of data suggest that if you want to start a successful and profitable new business, defense is not the place to do it (unless you are already a billionaire).
• The companies that are most able to help are not always willing to do so, whereas the companies that are willing to help are not always able to do so.
• Washington sacrificed speed and effectiveness in the military-industrial complex for the hope of cost savings and efficiency, and it ended up with neither.
• Many of the “transformational” procurement programs of the 1990s and 2000s are arriving so late (if at all) that the old systems they were supposed to replace are simply aging out of the force with nothing to take their place.
• The means to build a different and better US military have been consistently available and never more abundant than now, but too much money has been spent on old or unproven technologies in the pursuit of outdated or misguided conceptions of military power.
• To a large extent, the reason the United States has been so badly ambushed by the future is because the main problem we are struggling to address is incredibly difficult. Can militaries innovate and change in the absence of war? Indeed, this is the core question as the United States looks to the future of warfare.
• Militaries are unlike civilian institutions in many ways, but a primary difference is that they lack routine sources of real-world feedback on their performance.
• Military innovation and adaptation are made more difficult because the nature of any bureaucracy is to resist change, not promote it.
• For starters, real change requires the definition of clear threats. Militaries need to know with as much specificity as possible what operational problems they must solve through the development of new capabilities and new ways of fighting.
• It is only when civilian leaders and military mavericks are aligned in favor of disrupting the status quo that real innovation becomes possible in the absence of war.
• In reality, true military innovation is less about technology than about operational and organizational transformation.
• China is becoming America’s peer, and it could become more than that.
• What makes the Chinese Communist Party’s technological ambitions even more threatening to the United States is a major way that Beijing enacts them—through a systematic global campaign to capture the world’s best technology by whatever means necessary, which includes a massive foreign intelligence operation to steal trade secrets and intellectual property through cyber espionage and human spying.
• when US technology companies refuse to work with the Department of Defense but then do business in China, the practical effect is denying technology to their own military while providing it, knowingly or otherwise, to China’s military.
• The centerpiece of the Chinese Communist Party’s military buildup is the Chinese Navy.
• China’s government exports advanced weapons and the tools of high-tech authoritarianism to aspiring police states that want to surveil their citizens, regulate their thoughts, and crush dissent.
• The problem for the United States is that we have been building our military to project power and fight offensively for decades, while China has invested considerably in precision kill chains to counter the ability of the United States to project military power.
• The main goal will be accelerating the ability to close the kill chain and break rivals’ ability to do so.
• Hypersonic weapons are different because they can travel both fast and unpredictably.
• Commercial technology companies likely will not be the source of hypersonic technologies for the US military.
• New fiber lasers are much improved over older chemical lasers. Their beams are more concentrated and powerful.
• Low-kilowatt lasers can now burn holes through drones or vehicle engines. And higher-kilowatt lasers are being developed for defense against aircraft and missiles.
• The big hurdle that remains is power capacity. It takes a lot of power to fire directed energy weapons of any strength.
• A shadow cyber war has raged for years, especially between America and its great-power rivals.
• The broader significance is that the cyber domain and the electromagnetic spectrum will be central battlegrounds of future war.
• A major threat to the F-35 is not just enemy missiles but also the possibility that it could be cyberattacked before it ever gets off the ground.
• The application of artificial intelligence will open a whole new front in the cyber arms race that focuses on the corruption or poisoning of data. Artificial intelligence is only as good as the data that trains its algorithms.
• As classical computers reach the physical limits of their power, quantum computers could become vital to processing all of the data that intelligentized militaries create and collect.
• the moment of quantum supremacy is drawing near.
• An enabling capability that may have more immediate military impacts is biotechnology, which is already unlocking better understanding of human genetics and enabling the creation of customized treatments and technologies to augment human capabilities.
• Developments in biotechnology will mostly be extensions of current practices, albeit significant extensions.
• In the competition over biotechnology, it is hard to believe that the United States would cross certain ethical lines, but it is less clear whether the same can be said of the Chinese Communist Party.
• New space-based capabilities will be central to how militaries command and control their forces.
• Spacecraft have always been limited by the impracticality of refueling them.
• In the coming years, it will be possible to service, assemble, and manufacture complex orbital infrastructure in space that would be impractical to launch from Earth.
• In time, space will be transformed into a unique domain of human activity, and this will inevitably have military implications.
• Of all the new enabling technologies, perhaps the most consequential from a military standpoint is artificial intelligence and machine learning.
• The US military is drowning in data.
• Humans will eventually be able to delegate much of the cognitive burden of closing the kill chain to well-trained intelligent machines, thereby enabling people to focus on making better and faster decisions in warfare.
• Though 5G networks will be critical for broader economic and geopolitical purposes, communications networks are really just pipes for information.
• The greater danger for the United States is failing to recognize the true gravity of the kind of military technology race with the Chinese Communist Party that we are facing and falling behind because of our lack of urgency to run it.
• The real issue now and for the foreseeable future is the military use of narrow artificial intelligence.
• If we choose not to weaponize technologies such as artificial intelligence, that does not mean that our competitors will follow suit and be bound by the same choices.
• In time, intelligent machines should not just enhance manned platforms; they should replace them.
• A battle network is the means by which militaries close the kill chain. It is what enables them to understand, decide, and act.
• The problem is not that the US military is on the verge of taking humans “out of the loop” of the kill chain but that the US military today has way too many loops and way too many humans in the middle of all of them.
• The US military today is simply much slower and less effective than it could or should be at doing the one thing that will determine its success or failure—closing the kill chain.
• The most important objective is for the battle network to facilitate human understanding, decisions, and actions.
• The critical source of future military advantage will be the ability to impose so many complex dilemmas on our opponents at once that we shatter their kill chains, disrupt their ability to command and control their own forces, and leave them incapable of understanding what is happening, making sound decisions, and taking relevant actions.
• Putting people in machines makes them significantly more complex and expensive.
• Hiding from overhead surveillance will become infinitely harder as the heavens are filled with thousands of small satellites in the coming years.
• Militaries in the future will have little hope of hiding large traditional ships, aircraft, or ground force movements.
• hiding is becoming significantly harder, and militaries will need to search for new ways to conceal themselves beyond their traditional capabilities such as stealth.
• The speed of future military movement will accelerate further as more and more military things travel at hypersonic speeds, which is more than five times the speed of sound. Movement at these speeds will transform the timing and tempo of warfare.
• Logistics has been the greatest limiting factor in the history of warfare. Hence the old saying: “Amateurs talk tactics; professionals talk logistics.”
• Moving to and from space will become cheaper, easier, and more common, which means that militaries could eventually come to view space travel as little different from flying or sailing around the planet.
• Shooting has consistently and considerably improved over time. But success is always a function of three factors that do not change: the range of fire (how far militaries can shoot), the accuracy of fire (how well they can hit what they are shooting at), and the effect of fire (how much damage they can do).
• The improved range, accuracy, and effects of fire have already created considerable advantages for defenders over attackers, and emerging technologies will likely further this trend.
• The laws of physics, geography, and economics apply little or not at all to cyber and other non-kinetic weapons.
• Safe areas and sanctuaries will disappear. Everywhere will be contested and within range of enemy fires—even the US homeland.
• The goal of a Military Internet of Things is ubiquity—the ability of any sensor to enable any weapon to strike any kind of target at any time.
• As 3-D printing improves, however, military forces will be able to print more of their own ammunition near the battlefield.
• Communications are the links in any military’s kill chain.
• The new model of military communications will not be built around small numbers of centralized hubs but rather will push critical communications functions out to the edges of vast networks that are physically distributed, more secure, less vulnerable, and more resilient.
• Ubiquitous space-based communications networks will provide persistent access to information even in the most remote parts of the world.
• Machine behavior depends on the integrity of the data that trains the machines’ algorithms.
• The United States should assume that China, in particular, is racing to gain advantage in the same competitions, with the same—and, at times, better—technologies, and that the result could be a future Chinese military that shares most if not all of the same core capabilities and characteristics as our military could have.
• In short, a lot of people are saying a lot of the right things. But the main problem in recent decades has not been a failure to say the right things. It has been a failure to do enough of those right things.
• America’s strategic margin for error has disappeared.
• It is difficult to overstate what a complete anomaly the past three decades have been in the broad sweep of world history. This era of unrivaled American dominance stands in marked contrast to the rest of history, which has always been characterized instead by great-power competitions.
• What we have not considered, however, is that a foreign competitor would be willing or able to target the continental United States with large numbers of conventional weapons.
• We optimized the US military to project power overseas.
• The United States cannot and should not contest every difference that it has with China militarily. To the contrary, US leaders will have to determine what our nation’s core interests really are.
• US thinking about warfare must shift from an offensive to a defensive mind-set. In short, America needs to put the “defense” back in our defense strategy.
• If the United States develops a new, defensive way of war that is focused less on projecting military power than on countering the ability of others to do so, we could create the same dilemmas for our competitors that we are facing.
• The United States needs to build a different kind of military.
• Our focus must be on building and buying integrated networks of kill chains, not individual platforms and systems.
• Similarly, rather than expensive systems that are effectively irreplaceable, the future force should be built around lower-cost systems that are effectively expendable. If US systems are cheap to build, operate, and replenish, we would be more willing and able to lose them.
• People are expensive. Putting people in machines is even more expensive. And no one ever wants to pay the ultimate price of losing a human life.
• Manned systems will not fare well on future battlefields, which will be extremely violent with heavy losses on all sides.
• Finally, the future force must be defined more by its software than its hardware. It must be, in every way, a digital force. This is a total inversion of how military power has forever been conceived.
• What traditionally wins wars is hardware. It is iron and steel.
• The goal is to acquire whatever combination of smart systems adds up to a superior capability that enables humans to understand, decide, and act.
• What Trump gets wrong is that the United States does not have allies because we are suckers. We have allies because it benefits America. We want allies because it is better than being alone. We need allies because maintaining a favorable balance of power is not possible without them.
• The main question is not whether the US military should change but whether we can change—and change fast enough.
• Think of the budget process as the opposite of the kill chain. Whereas the kill chain is supposed to be fast, meticulous, and uncompromising in its precision, the budget process is slow, tedious, unruly, and defined by messy, imperfect compromises. And yet both are essential.
• If you want to know what leaders in Washington really value, what they say matters a lot less than what they spend money on. Spending is what reveals their true priorities—what matters most.
• What precedes the budget process is “the requirements process,” and what follows it is “the acquisition process.”
• The requirements process is how the Department of Defense determines what constitutes a “validated” military capability to develop or buy.
• Those who have the authority to do things differently rarely use it, and those who do make decisions often lack the authority and incentives to make riskier decisions to get better outcomes.
• The requirements process and the acquisition process often impede good outcomes. But the bigger problem is that we spend too much money on the wrong things and not enough on the right things. And that has more to do with the budget process.
• Most of the incentives that govern the Pentagon’s bureaucracy favor the past over the future.
• Defense lobbyists are a convenient scapegoat. But the real problem is not that a handful of big defense contractors have a loud voice in the budget process. The real problem is that so few defense companies are left in America after decades of defense industry consolidation, that so few of the remaining companies are leaders in emerging technologies, and that those which are doing this futuristic work for the US military have little to no voice in the budget process.
• In Congress, less than 1 percent of members have studied computer science, and few have meaningful experience working in the technology industry.
• The shift to emerging technologies in place of existing systems could happen much faster than most people in the defense establishment realize, and the backlash could be severe.
• A good idea rarely wins on its merits alone. Its success too often comes down, instead, to the trading of favors and the political dark arts.
• There are no technological miracles or deus ex machina to save us.
• Translating vague, buzzwordy goals into clear operational problems is necessary for US leaders to create the incentives that can generate better, more relevant capabilities for the US military much faster.
• The Department of Defense rarely uses mission-focused competitions to identify the best solutions in the way that has proven so effective in the commercial world.
• companies that want to build a different kind of military cannot expect to win strictly by the quality of their new solutions alone.
• There is a reason why parts of the F-35 are built in every state in America, and it is not business efficiency. It is political expediency.
• If we want different and better outcomes, we have to create different and better incentives to get them.
• We have so many decent, hardworking, dedicated people. We have such amazing technology in our country. We have all the money we need. The bigger problem, however, remains: we just cannot get out of our own way.
• Our failure to adapt will not stop others from doing so. If America does not change itself, change will still happen.